Hello!
My name is Erica, and I live with my sister Justine. We bought our first house together a year ago, with the plan of renovating it over the next two years and turning it into a lovely little home. This blog aims to follow the highs and lows of renovating on a budget whilst holding down full-time jobs. I’ll be blogging about our ongoing projects, design ideas, interiors inspiration and all things homey! In addition to this we are slowly building up an impressive number of tools and learning new skills all the time, so expect to find any tips we have learnt along the way. So a bit about us…
Erica – loves DIY, her dogs, cooking, travelling, photography, making things, shopping, typography, giving life to old furniture, going to the tip, magazines, weddings, her boyfriend Tom, gardening, decorating, being a midwife and shoes! So most things really!
Justine loves natural history, walking the dogs, photography, music, gigs, chocolate, the countryside and scrumpy!
We have both inherited an ‘I could do that’ attitude from our parents. This has led to us being unable to pay for anything without having a go ourselves first, whether this is artwork for our home, or plumbing in our kitchen, eek! We spend a lot of time browsing shops, magazines and the internet sourcing ideas and then spend days working out how we could do it ourselves. We rented our house for a year before we bought it, so spent a year thinking about all the things we would do if it was our house. Finally we now have the chance to make those dreams a reality.
Our house is a victorian, terraced cottage in leafy Cheshire. It has two bedrooms, a postage stamp kitchen, a scruffy, walled courtyard garden, some original features, some hideous and quite random features and a whole lot of potential. We share our home with my springer spaniels Holly and Bramble (very gorgeous, slightly crazy and also sisters) and my lovely boyfriend Tom. The dogs feature highly in our blog because as well as making us laugh all the time, all house decisions have to consider them. We always have to ask ourselves is it dog safe/friendly/proof, but they are worth the challenge!
I hope you like my blog, please leave comments or get in contact if you like what you see, I’d love to hear from you.
Erica xx
Very admirable of you both to take on this big challenge.
aww thanks Malou, we love your photos!
I’m nominating you for an award in my 6pm post tomorrow. I admire all your optimism and hard work!
Hello! We are about to lay some Richmond Oak laminate in our huge, fiddly, bay windowed, kitchen and want it to run all the way through the hall to the sitting room- ideally we wanted to have it in the bathroom too which comes off the hall but it says its not suitable! Do you think we should risk it anyway?! Also, we want to lay it on the existing floorboards (we’d like to keep them but we want provide more sound insulation and warmth)- what underlay do you think we just use?!
Hi I’m so sorry for my incredibly late reply. I am sure you have laid the flooring already now. We used the home base underlay, the most expensive one they have. It’s over a wooden floor in the front room and is great. There are a few bouncy bits where we didn’t hammer the floorboards down enough underneath though. Not sure about a bathroom, would probably just need replacing sooner but a lot of it depends on how well ventilated it is. Hope it looks great x
PS Excuse my typos!